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Newsweek International
June 3, 2002
The Ruins of an Empire
Will Georgia ever emerge from Russia’s shadow?
By Ken Stier
The place looked as if a storm had hit it. In the wreckage of a former Soviet military base, about 40 kilometers east of Tbilisi, Gen. Gia Uchava recently welcomed a team of U.S. Special Forces trainers to their new home away from home. Gesturing toward a gutted control tower above an abandoned firing range, the Georgian Army officer apologized for the Vasiani base’s woeful state of disrepair. The Russians had ransacked it when they pulled out last year, he explained. The departing troops hadn’t only hauled away weapons and other portable gear. They had cut power lines and stripped wiring, plumbing and everything else they could sell as scrap. Then they had trashed what was left. “They are very pissed off that we now have good relations with the West—especially the U.S.,” Uchava said.
IF RUSSIA’S TROOPS were unhappy before, just wait. The American newcomers were only an advance team. In the next few months, Washington intends to put as many as 150 trainers in Georgia and provide $64 million in military aid—almost four times the former Soviet republic’s annual defense budget. Up to now, Georgian security forces have been hopelessly outmatched by smugglers, arms traffickers and Islamic extremists. Chechen rebels and Qaeda-linked fighters enjoy free run of such areas as the notorious Pankisi Gorge. The U.S. aid is meant to help clean out the terrorists, and the program seems to have Vladimir Putin’s blessing—at least for now. The Russian president is in no position to prevent it anyway. Besides, the U.S. presence may reduce the threat of Islamic separatism on Russian soil.
But many Russians, including top-ranking military officers, hardly share Putin’s equanimity. To them, the U.S. program is an unnerving demonstration of the West’s rising influence in a region that effectively belonged to Russia for 200 years. When Russian news services broke the story of the deployment of U.S. trainers in Georgia, opinion polls in Moscow registered the worst drop in pro-U.S. sentiment since the war in Kosovo. Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Kosovan bluntly told the ITAR-Tass news agency: “The presence of American divisions in Georgia should worry any Russian soldier.”
The Americans are treading as lightly as they know how. No one can disguise the West’s interest in the republic’s strategic value. But U.S. officials insist that the trainers are stationed in Georgia only temporarily. Two years from now, when the program officially ends, Georgia should have some 2,000 well-trained troops in four specialized battalions, and a National Military Command Center that for the first time will coordinate the republic’s security services. The idea is to give Georgia enough muscle both to meet its own military needs and to support the war on terror. “Everyone we train is a future trainer,” says the U.S. team leader in Georgia, Lt. Col. Robert M. Waltmeyer. “We want to leave in place a sustainable training program.”
That’s not all Georgia needs. Its soldiers often go without boots and food. Aid money sometimes vanishes without a trace. Large areas remain outside the central government’s control. Still, what scares many Georgians worst is their giant northern neighbor. “They believe we are playing at being an independent country,” says Alexander Rondeli of the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies. “They don’t consider us as a serious people.” Some Georgians make no secret of their hope that America will strengthen their independence. “Georgia’s strategy is to use the U.S. to gradually push out the Russians,” says Ghia Nodia of the Caucasian Institute for Peace, Democracy and Development.
Russia has no intention of letting itself be pushed. The sentiment is particularly strong in the military’s ranks. The Kremlin once controlled about 2,000 security facilities in Georgia. Most were shut down after the Soviet collapse. But Russia still maintains major bases—in three of Georgia’s most sensitive areas. Russia helped one of these areas, Abkhazia, to become a de facto breakaway republic, which is now “protected” by 2,000 mostly Russian peacekeepers. In mid-April, Russian helicopter gunships penetrated Abkhazia’s volatile Kodori Gorge—the last area still held by the Georgian government. U.N. officials denounced the raid as “a combat operation, not a peacekeeping operation.”
Georgia wants to do more than complain about such attacks. According to Archil Gegshidze, formerly President Eduard Shevardnadze’s chief foreign-policy adviser, the hope is that the U.S. training program will eventually evolve into “the complete reorganization of the armed forces,” eventually paving the way to full NATO membership. The Russians may have their own ideas about that.
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